La Place de l'Étoile

By Patrick Modiano and Frank Wynne

The first novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, which with The Night Watch and Ring Roads forms a trilogy of the Occupation

'A Marcel Proust of our time' Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy
'Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and a spokesman for the disappeared, and I am thrilled that the Swedish Academy has recognised him' Rupert Thomson, Guardian

Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation.

We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphaël Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun… or he may have been none of these things.

But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Étoile' – the Place of the Star – which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781408867969

Patrick Modiano

PATRICK MODIANO was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels—including the Goncourt Prize−winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacombe Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation,” calling him “a Marcel Proust of our time.”

Reviews for La Place de l'Étoile

[ameise1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a fulminant first work. Patrick Modiano is so speech-wielding. Raphaël Schlemilovitch is a kind of masquerader who wants to please everyone and wants to enjoy his own life, but in the end he fails and ends up in a mental hospital. The stories are jumping around in the historical time, one is before WWII, then during the war and then again after the war, but never in the correct order. Raphël slips into various roles, compares himself with well-known writers, imitates them and writes himself.